Stuck with Majority Rule

If there be such a thing as a good Liberal (other than a dead one), then in this reviewer’s book political theorist David Spitz is—and has been for a long time—it. He writes out of a vast firsthand knowledge of the literature of politics; he is clearheaded, unsentimental, sérieux. He would not, one gets to feel, try to have it both ways on an intellectual issue, even if nobody were looking and he could easily get by with it. He is aware that there are points of view different from his own that might be worth listening to, and makes a patently honest effort to understand them and come to grips with them. Best of all, he writes with respect, warmth and affection of those who disagree with him: he really means it about freedom of thought and speech—to the extent, for example, that one senses in him a man who on his campus would insist that academic freedom extends even to Conservatives. He would, I think, even leave out the “even.”

With respect to the first of these propositions, his logic appears to run as follows: the principle of consent is the valid principle of authority; that principle calls as a matter of course for democracy; democracy calls for majority rule; and majority rule calls for the elimination of the non-majoritarian features of our political system (separation of powers, staggered elections, over-representation of particular constituencies in our bicameral legislatures). Spitz recognizes, in a word, that democracy is stuck with majority rule (a thesis upon which this reviewer has been hammering for many years), and that, therefore, those who defend democracy as something other than a pis aller (i.e., as valid in and of itself), must also defend majority rule and its foreseeable consequences as something other than a pis aller (that is, as something it is possible to make out a case for). Whence—and Spitz travels the whole road— the “barriers” to majority rule have, in principle, to go.

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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If there be such a thing as a good Liberal (other than a dead one), then in this reviewer’s book political theorist David Spitz is—and has been for a long time—it. He writes out of a vast firsthand knowledge of the literature of politics; he is clearheaded, unsentimental, sérieux. He would not, one gets to feel, try to have it both ways on an intellectual issue, even if nobody were looking and he could easily get by with it. He is aware that there are points of view different from his own that might be worth listening to, and makes a patently honest effort to understand them and come to grips with them. Best of all, he writes with respect, warmth and affection of those who disagree with him: he really means it about freedom of thought and speech—to the extent, for example, that one senses in him a man who on his campus would insist that academic freedom extends even to Conservatives. He would, I think, even leave out the “even.”

With respect to the first of these propositions, his logic appears to run as follows: the principle of consent is the valid principle of authority; that principle calls as a matter of course for democracy; democracy calls for majority rule; and majority rule calls for the elimination of the non-majoritarian features of our political system (separation of powers, staggered elections, over-representation of particular constituencies in our bicameral legislatures). Spitz recognizes, in a word, that democracy is stuck with majority rule (a thesis upon which this reviewer has been hammering for many years), and that, therefore, those who defend democracy as something other than a pis aller (i.e., as valid in and of itself), must also defend majority rule and its foreseeable consequences as something other than a pis aller (that is, as something it is possible to make out a case for). Whence—and Spitz travels the whole road— the “barriers” to majority rule have, in principle, to go.